Tuesday, September 15, 2015

The '80s Music That Inspired HARROWED and The Woodsview Murders

Trick Or Treat (1986)

When Jolene and I were first talking about working together, we knew we had a common love of ‘80s horror movies. As soon as we started brainstorming however, it became clear that we had a another interest in common that would become central to the Woodsview Murders series—’80s rock and metal music.

I grew up in the ‘80s, and the music of that decade is forever woven into my existence. There is not a day that goes by that I’m not listening to one of the bands I grew up with. My tastes run from hair metal bands like Poison and Cinderella, to rock icons AC/DC, to thrash legends Megadeth and Slayer. If it’s on the rock and heavy metal spectrum, I love it.

Turns out, Jolene likes a lot of that stuff too, and the Venn diagram of our musical tastes overlaps quite a bit when it comes to ‘80s rock and metal.

So, when we created HARROWED as our love letter to the slasher movies of the ‘80s, we decided that it needed a killer soundtrack (pun intended). Since we don’t have the deep pockets it would take to license an actual soundtrack full of songs, we did the next best thing--created a playlist that captures the feel of our story and the music that inspired it.

An early working title for Harrowed was Killchat, and that’s the name of our playlist. You can listen to the entire thing here:

But here are a few choice cuts from it:

Awesome, right? There's a smattering of '70s (and even '60s) rock and metal in there as well, as we don't discriminate between awesome decades of music. But the '80s is king, and that decade of music and movies is the heart and soul of HARROWED.

Jolene and I have talked about putting a CD cover insert together for our playlist, so that if someone bought the individual songs from their platform of choice they could print out the insert and make their own soundtrack for HARROWED. Stay tuned for more details on that, but in the meantime--enjoy the music!